Editor's note

Well, as the author contemplates the headlines these days about food and energy prices, and the dire predictions to which they give rise, he gets a similar sense of time travel, only not nearly so entertaining. In dark moments, he can quite easily see a future in which everyone ends up dirt farmers, tilling the back 40 for their own chow, and without a tractor, of course, which would be too expensive to run. As put into stark relief by the Doha round at the WTO, free trade in agriculture is something the world has never had the guts to attempt. But maybe someday it will.